Ok, I have to admit the painful truth. I'm reliably slow to the finish line. This year, I got my slides into PASS HQ by the skin of my teeth, the weekend before the event was to begin. Although I could say with a straight face ''I uploaded my slides!''. I have to be honest that I wasn't surprised when many of my attendees said that ...

In last month's column, ''2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as
We Know It,'' I described a number of major developments in the IT
industry that are likely to disrupt the life of database professionals
everywhere. I categorize those four disruptors - virtualization, cloud
computing, solid state drives (SSD), and advanced ...